Review: Waiting

[megwrites]

Title: Waiting
Author: Ha Jin
Genre: Fiction
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage






The basic plotline: Waiting is the story of Lin Kong, who is in a loveless, arranged marriage with Shuyu, who he married so she could take care of his ailing parents. Shuyu is an embarassment to Lin, an army doctor in the Revolutionary Army, stationed in Huji City. The novel follows him as he waits, year after year, for the time when he can divorce his wife and be with the woman with whom he has struck up an intense relationship that they cannot consummate because of the strict rules they live under.


The Positives After the last book, it was nice to read a novel where the author wasn't so concerned with showing off that they didn't get around to telling the story or making it obvious what the story even was. I tore through this novel in two and a half days, which is as fast as I've ever read anything. It is a wonderfully easy read that manages to be engaging and complex without having to be confusing.

Waiting is a very plain, unadorned piece of work, but elegant in it's way. This is a very straightforward novel. It gets from point a to point b without stopping in between for anything else, a fact I really appreciated.

Though it is a love story, it is neither romantic nor easily digestible. In place of a neat, clean happy ending, we are left with the complexities and uncertainties of a life that may or may not have been wasted in waiting. The author withholds any kind of decisive judgment, and that is more a positive than a negative in my view. The author forces us to dwell in a world where sometimes the good guys lose and the bad guys win, or worse than that, people are both good and bad and they end up somewhere in the middle - a little happy and a little sad.

In way, Waiting is the penultimate thinking woman's love story.

There is never a moment of clear triumph, even when Lin achieves the divorce he's been seeking for eighteen years. It is not even entirely clear that Lin and Manna are the people we should be rooting for in the first place. The author does not refrain from showing us the consequences of their actions, whether those consequences (such as the damage to their careers) are undeserved or not. Nor does the author shy away from showing the family that Lin is so eager to pull away from, and the daughter that gets left behind.

There are times when their love affair seems petty, selfish, and even malicious. There are also times when they themselves, and the reader, are left to wonder if it's even love that's keeping them together. That perhaps, is the greatest accomplishment of this novel. It displays, in very clear and precise terms, exactly how hard it may be for any of us to really know what love is - and how there is no such thing as true love or pure love, at least not long as you're loving a human being. Instead, we see that love comes bundled with loss, sacrifice, jealousy, pettiness, desperation, practical necessity, and shortsightedness, that love can fade, and even go sour.

I also appreciated greatly that while the pall of strict Communism and the Revolution lingered over everything, it was always in the background. The political and social commentary on those decades and the government were left for the reader to glean. From Lin and Manna making fake covers to hide unapproved books to Lin remembering a woman who's husband shoved batteries into her vagina when she became pregnant with an illegal second child, costing their family a thousand yuan fine.

I'm sure there's even more that I missed because my knowledge of this period of Chinese history and culture is woefully lacking, and I'm sure that if I knew more, this book would have been even more gripping.

On it's own, just as a love story, it's as fraught, complicated, and human as anyone could want. It is, perhaps, the most real love story I have ever read.

There are no easy good guys or bad guys, even Shuyu's meddling, money grubbing brother, and there is as much sympathy for the steadfastly loyal, simple Shuyu who seems a perpetual victim of the schemes of others as there is for Manna and Lin who are kept apart by duty and their own indecisiveness.

The characters are as sympathetic as they are flawed, and I found myself feeling both pity and frustration with them. There were times when I wanted to condemn them as selfish, stupid, indecisive, but as I read on, I realized that Lin and Manna were, in a way, representative of us all, the things we will hold on, and the uncertainty that we always bear about whether the sacrifices we make are worth it or not.

There are occasional moments of humor in the novel, though they are sparsely planted throughout. The funniest moment in the book comes while Manna is learning to ride a bike and accidentally hits a senior officer's wife.


The Negatives Such a straightforward novel does come with a sense of weariness, because it goes straight through the years that Lin and Manna spend waiting to be married, and the marriage afterwards.

If you want a satisfying ending, this is not for you. There is no climactic, no catharsis, no moment that sets it all right. Even when Lin and Manna are finally able to get married, their marriage is not the perfect, golden state of bliss that they've been waiting eighteen years for.

Instead it is fraught with everything from sexual problems to jealousy and the exhausting task of raising children. Manna and Lin are not starcrossed by any sense of the imagination, and that might leave a bitter taste in some readers' mouths.

The prose, also, is not lyrical. If you're looking for something that has a poetic touch, this isn't for you. Sometimes the narration is blocky and too matter-of-fact for it's own good. There are times when the inner thoughts of the characters feels stiff, formal.

Readers might also be put off by the graphic description of rape in the novel, when Manna is forced onto a bed and assaulted by a drunk casual acquaintence, Geng Yeng. While I don't necessarily count it wrong or bad that the same clinical lens is applied to a violent sexual crime as the rest of the book, it might be severely triggering to many readers. I know that I winced and had to take a moment to put the book down.


CoC Score: 10. I think it should be obvious why this novel recieves that score. It manages to both explore a culture that is foreign to the people it is intended to be read by (the novel was originally written in English, IIRC) and make it clear that, at the end of the day, people are people - that forbidden love affairs under strict rules are not all that much different, no matter where or who you are. Indeed, the novel seems to prove - without having to make any statement to the effect - that while there will always be cultural differences and political divides, that people are startlingly similiar underneath it all. That such things as jealousy, desperation, longing, desire, uncertainty and love are universal.

Gender Score: 8. The novel is surprisingly sympathetic and even fair to it's female characters, though there are moments when the power dynamic that exists between Manna and Lin in their professional lives is not explored as I think it could have been. It also portrays a rape, and while that is not strictly a bad or wrong thing, it does get more quickly backgrounded and put away than I would like on the first go, though it does briefly explore Manna's distress when she sees the man who raped her being interviewed on TV for being a big success in the business world and making thousands of yuan a year in construction.

GLBT Score: 0. No overtly GLBT characters. Bisexuality is mentioned as an accusation of abnormality in one line: "I saw the size of his dick in the showers. Now I wonder if he is a bisexual.". Other than that, the topic is not really brought up or mentioned. Given that it's a novel about a drawn out heterosexual love affair, one is not surprised.